This is an analogy to the Three Body Problem from Liu Cixin!

I’ve heard that book(series?) pop up quite a lot recently. Is it worth a read?

It's a three book series. It has a prequel, which adds little to the trilogy. It's highly awarded. It's interesting in that it was originally written in Chinese and it's uncommon for a translated book to make this big of an impact in sci-fi circles.

You see it a lot in space conversations because it covers planetary gravity in an interesting way.

I had a hard time getting through book 1, the other two in the trilogy are easier to read, but they're certainly entertaining and original.

It is, somehow, very bleak and pessimistic compared to your average (western?) sci-fi.

I've had good success with the audiobook + ebook combo in general. I'll listen to an audiobook while cooking, showering, etc and read it physically on a tablet or my phone when I want.

I started reading the first book before I started using this method, and abandoned the series a couple times but saw it coming up so often in sci-fi recommendations I kept wanting to get through it

I found the first half of book one elicited no interest in reading in my down time, but was just barely interesting enough to not quit listening.

By the second half of book one and the entire rest of the series (plus the author approved fan fiction fourth book) I completely gave up on the audiobook because the story was so good that I wanted to read it as quickly as possible. I actually switched to reading on my phone in the shower over listening.

It starts off slow but gets good and stays extremely good. One of my favorite series.

Yep. Some good sci-fi. Each one is a bit different, but terrific. Funny enough I was thinking earlier this week that I should re-read them since it’s been a number of years.

If you are have already read a bunch o sci-fi books, yes.

Otherwise it'll be like drinking from a firehose.

I really liked the first book, towards the second and third it got a little bit slow and repetitive. Not anywhere on par with e.g. Hyperion Cantos, but otherwise very good read.

There’s very little which holds ground versus Hyperion though… so GP if you haven’t already, go read that

No. It's a tedious slog, devoid of interest on any axis: characters, plot, worldbuilding and science are all paper-thin. Its popularity baffles me.

It's popularity is pretty easy to understand. It was the first proper scifi novel written in the native tongue of over a billion people.

What is “proper” vs eg the others on this list? Honest question.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_science_fiction

Did you read the wiki link? There's very little, and much of it is more kafka-esque political commentary rather than hard scifi.

I don't know, I lived in China for 9 years, and scifi and fantasy media were highly discouraged by the party (as mentioned in the wiki link), and no one I knew had anything to recommend that was originally written in Chinese. When Three Body Problem came out, people went nuts. Every nerd and engineer in the country read it.

Thank you. It’s amazing that +1bn people with theoretical access to the world’s resources didn’t spontaneously create 10000 sci-fi books. Similar isolation the other way around. Societies are still so isolated (language, culture, political leanings) despite so much integration.

>theoretical access to the world’s resources

There's the rub. Access to the world's cultural resources is highly limited in China. They've outright firewalled the internet.

I don't think that's true either. I think it was just the first such to get translated to English. I think it's popular because the premise is interesting. The Dark Forest is just part of the vocabulary now, and that's not an accident, it's genuinely worth thinking about and, if not technically new, at least newly popularized.

On a "technicality" front, I'm sure you could find something if you dug through the archives, but really there was no hard modern scifi in China that was heavily published and got any traction until TBP. The party even discouraged fantasy media. I lived there and hung out with nerds, and they were ecstatic when the book came out.

Did you read all three? The first one isn't great but as a trilogy I found it quite good. There are several places where the story building contradicts itself but if you are willing to look past those then it's solid science fiction. It's not on the level of Arthur C. Clarke or Asimov but they were obviosly big influences.

I found the first the best, second unbearable, and third absolutely not worth it given the slog of dark forest.

Liu's writing is incredible, but he reminds me of George RR Martin or.....bare with me..Vince McMahon. Unable to get beyond the "fleshing out" phase.

Same, it was nearly impossible to finish due to it being so dull.

I had the exact opposite thought - the first book was interesting and thought-provoking, while the other two just piled on more and more scifi concepts that (imo) have been better explored by other authors.

No. I was ready to give up on the first one about a third of the way through but people told me "it gets good later"; it didn't. So when I hear people saying that about the trilogy it's a bit of a "fool me once, shame on you" situation.

It brings me sanity to hear others say this. I thought the story was convoluted and characters uninteresting.

It was tedious, but so was Herodotus. Tedious does not mean uninteresting ...TBP was very interesting; especially the takedown of group-think revolutionary marxists. For example, and purposely vague to avoid spoilage, the young female guard's behavior echoes much of what we're seeing in today's colleges.

Read Born Red for a first hand account of such follies. We in the West love to pretend inconvenient history doesn’t exist.

Well, you know, that's just your opinion, man.

I read maybe half of the first book, and it was so bad I had to put it down. Maybe the translation is dry, or maybe the thin, stereotypical characters wore on me.

From the perspective of someone who has read 100's of SF books: not really. But if you haven't or if you want to have a taste of what looking at SF through a Chinese lens would look like then it's probably worth it.

The best sci-fi trilogy I’ve ever read. I don’t know why there is a lot of hate on hn towards it.

It's written with a different focus than traditional western sci-fi. Pacing is different, characters are unexpected in certain ways, etc. I can see how people don't like the style, I personally enjoyed the 'something different'.

Some recommendations based on that: The Forever War trilogy is IMO the best "future war" mil sci fi series.

The standalone book Old Man's War is also incredible.

And of course....Hyperion is the king of the entire genre. If you haven't read those I'd highly recommend it, will change your life.

Yes. It's the best science fiction I've read in years.

If you go in expecting adventure fiction, then it's not enjoyable. It's more like reading something like Olaf Stapledon.

It's a manic roller-coaster that will make you feel like the ground beneath your feat suddenly vanished. Absolutely crazy flights of fantasy.

Books 2 and 3 were some of the best books I've _ever_ read.